Bay 12 Games Forum

"Hey. Bob. You may need to back off a little. Do you want to switch out?"
Shiina offers to switch with Bob.

And this is why Shiina has a giant fuck-off RES score to back-up her Tower Stance.

".....anyway, Shiina, about that thing last night while we were alone business you suggested..."

you monster
-9999999999 karma for you
"You're on your own."

My mistake. But everyone knows color similarities are purely coincidence anyway!

Then again, Sachi was a coward, Shiina is....significantly less cowardly.

_{"This guy is freakin' me out, Shiina. Why does he look so much like me?"
"I know what you mean... They are very similar to us."}
"So, you guys comin' or what? I wanna introduce you to my friend--"
"Our friend."
"...our friend, Kirito."
"Uh, s-sure, Klein... Sachi..."

the world immediately explodes
never shall the twain selves meet

It can safely be AU to begin with, as I don't think anyone actually depends on, say, Kirito or any of the canon characters or elements existing to have their backstory, no matter how funny it would be to have Sachi and Klein somehow meet Tzouboi and Shiina.

Different as they may be, I will always call SAO .hack//simplified

this

There HAVE been total-immersion VR games pre-SAO as mentioned in the OP, they were just complete shit until Kayaba drew up his stuff.  Also, the cost of moving over to Japan to play a game for two months is....kinda shit compared to pirating that crap or something. Unless you're rich as hell, just wait for it to come over to your country.

And we're never told in the light novels about gamers outside Japan because they didn't exist there; this is an AU, so it's a given there are different things to begin with. Kayaba's characterisation might just be that little different to justify international servers, or it could even be someone who isn't Kayaba in the first place.

Finally, why would you waste time to draw international players in by making SAO English? There's a perfectly large playerbase in Japan alone without immigration.

Sure, did you not watch SAO it happened a few times.

Still, Bob would be pretty easy to pick out.

Going after one guy, against a ton of non-human enemies- unless we're going up against Laughing Coffin or something- and said guy happens to be at the front, where the nearest character, likely either Aurelius, Tzouboi or Shiina, can two shot kill him in revenge, or kill him before he kills Bradley period.

Yeah, totally worth.